Researchers suggest this may lead to pro-social behavior in the real world

“We suggest that pro-social behavior also may result when guilt is provoked by virtual behavior.”

Matthew Grizzard, assistant professor of communication

University at Buffalo

BUFFALO, N.Y. — New evidence suggests heinous behavior
played out in a virtual environment can lead to players’
increased sensitivity toward the moral codes they violated.

That is the surprising finding of a study led by Matthew
Grizzard, PhD, assistant professor in the University at Buffalo
Department of Communication, and co-authored by researchers at
Michigan State University and the University of Texas, Austin.

“Rather than leading players to become less moral,”
Grizzard says, “this research suggests that violent
video-game play may actually lead to increased moral sensitivity.
This may, as it does in real life, provoke players to engage in
voluntary behavior that benefits others.”

The study, “Being Bad in a Video Game Can Make Us More
Morally Sensitive,” was published online ahead of print on
June 20 in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social
Networking.

Grizzard points out that several recent studies, including this
one, have found that committing immoral behaviors in a video game
elicits feelings of guilt in players who commit them.

The current study found such guilt can lead players to be more
sensitive to the moral issues they violated during game play. Other
studies have established that in real life scenarios, guilt evoked
by immoral behavior in the “real-world” elicits
pro-social behaviors in most people.

“We suggest that pro-social behavior also may result when
guilt is provoked by virtual behavior,” Grizzard says.

Researchers induced guilt in participants by having them play a
video game where they violated two of five moral domains:
care/harm, fairness/reciprocity, in-group loyalty, respect for
authority, and purity/sanctity.

“We found that after a subject played a violent video
game, they felt guilt and that guilt was associated with greater
sensitivity toward the two particular domains they violated —
those of care/harm and fairness/reciprocity,” Grizzard says.
The first includes behaviors marked by cruelty, abuse and lack of
compassion, and the second, by injustice or the denial of the
rights of others.

“Our findings suggest that emotional experiences evoked by
media exposure can increase the intuitive foundations upon which
human beings make moral judgments,” Grizzard says.
“This is particularly relevant for video-game play, where
habitual engagement with that media is the norm for a small, but
considerably important group of users.”

Grizzard explains that in life and in game, specific definitions
of moral behavior in each domain will vary from culture to culture
and situation to situation.

“For instance,” he says, “an American who
played a violent game ‘as a terrorist’ would likely
consider his avatar’s unjust and violent behavior —
violations of the fairness/reciprocity and harm/care domains
— to be more immoral than when he or she performed the same
acts in the role of a ‘UN peacekeeper.’”

In conducting the study, researchers combined a model of
intuitive morality and exemplars representing current advances in
moral psychology with media-effects theories to explain how
mediated or indirect experiences influence individuals’ moral
judgments.

The study involved 185 subjects who were randomly assigned to
either a guilt-inducing condition — in which they played a
shooter game as a terrorist or were asked to recall real-life acts
that induced guilt — or a control condition — shooter
game play as a UN soldier and the recollection of real-life acts
that did not induce guilt.

After completing the video game or the memory recall,
participants completed a three-item guilt scale and a 30-item moral
foundations questionnaire designed to assess the importance to them
of the five moral domains cited above.

Correlations were calculated among the variables in the study,
with separate correlation matrices calculated for the video-game
conditions and the memory-recall conditions. The study found
significant positive correlations between video-game guilt and the
moral foundations violated during game play.

The study was co-authored by Ron Tamborini, PhD, professor,
Department of Communication, Michigan State University; Robert J.
Lewis, PhD, assistant professor, Department of Advertising and
Public Relations, University of Texas, Austin; and Lu Wang, a
former graduate student in the Department of Communication at
Michigan State.

In May, a study by Tamborini, Grizzard, Lewis and three other
authors published in Journal
of Communication described mechanisms involved in exposure to
entertainment and moral judgment processes.

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